BOSTON, MA – November 17, 2015 — /BackupReview.info/ – Actifio, the copy data virtualization company, today announced the availability of a platform extension called Big Data Director (“BDD.”) BDD helps customers protect and recover large-scale file systems, drastically reducing backup windows compared to traditional approaches such as Network Data Management Protocol (NDMP). Notably, Actifio BDD can also provide access to as many as 50 million files in under five minutes, accelerating recovery and analytics processes. BDD was released as part of Actifio’s Virtual Data Pipeline version 6.2, also available now.

Actifio has now helped over 1,000 enterprise customers – both directly and through its rapidly expanding global network of cloud service provider partners – modernize their backup once and for all using its patented Virtual Data Pipeline™ (VDP) technology, delivering:

One early user of Actifio BDD is a Fortune 100 financial services company with a complex IT environment including hundreds of VMware VMs, physical servers for Microsoft SQL Server databases and data warehouses of up to 10 TB in size, as well as more than 20 million files across 3 million directories on 45TB of Isilon NAS. The firm’s IT organization was challenged to backup and recover both its large databases and the substantial file data in timeframes that were acceptable to the business. In particular, replicating backups of the Isilon file storage was impossible with its current implementation, so it made do with additional expensive NAS snapshots.

After considering various packages of different tools, including Isilon replication, Commvault, EMC Networker and an upgrade of their legacy backup tools, the company deployed Actifio to protect all of its open systems environment. This includes its vSphere environment, physical servers and databases, as well as the Isilon NAS data. Now with Actifio BDD, incremental backups of the NAS environment are always done in under 20 minutes. All of the NAS-based files are accessible in minutes on-site, or at its DR site, because of the firm’s use of Actifio Dedup Async Replication. Additionally, local or remote recovery of VMs and databases can be done in minutes, as opposed to the two-to-three days it formerly took the firm to recover large databases from tape. By consolidating its data protection approaches onto Actifio, the company has eliminated three hardware platforms and five software tools, substantially simplifying the IT team’s operations and reducing cost.

“Like most large businesses, time is what really counts to Sutherland. Even the top traditional backup systems could not deliver the recovery times we wanted for our mission critical SQL databases and VMware environment,” said David Tefft, Director of Network Operations at global law firm Sutherland. “The rapid recovery and access that Actifio delivers, along with its efficient and unique approach to virtualizing, managing and moving data, is why it’s our standard to protect hundreds of terabytes of our data.”

“The biggest backup and data protection pain points for enterprise IT leaders are, first, ‘Cost’, second, ‘Keeping pace with the capacity of data to protect,’ and third, ‘Reducing backup and recovery times,’” said Scott Sinclair, analyst of Enterprise Strategy Group, a leading enterprise technology analyst firm. “Actifio’s enterprise-class copy data virtualization platform is able to address these pains by saving companies money through infrastructure and tool consolidation, delivering instant mounts for data access and shrinking non-production data growth with virtual data copies. The extension of those capabilities out to large NAS servers is an exciting development, given the presence of such NAS systems among many in Actifio’s growing enterprise customer base.”

Actifio Founder & CEO Ash Ashutosh said, “It’s been widely reported over the last few weeks that it’s just a matter of time before the cost of enterprise storage approaches zero. Some have argued it’s already there. Our ambition is to take that one step further… to drive the cost of backup to zero, to make it a fringe benefit of enterprise-class copy data virtualization that enables data mobility for the hybrid cloud and self-serve instant access for application developers. BDD extends the umbrella of that backup one more step into the data center, and our customers can expect more to come.”

Additional Product Features and Availability
Actifio VDP 6.2 is generally available now. It includes enhancements in test data management to improve application development and testing with expanded workflows for self-service and scheduled data provisioning, enhanced SQL Server support and more granular information on mounted application data. VDP 6.2 also includes replication management, security and multi-tenancy enhancements, vSphere 6 support, and more granular protection of specific volumes inside VMs.

Actifio BDD is generally available for EMC Isilon scale-out NAS environments and is in beta for NetApp 7-Mode NAS systems. NetApp Cluster-Mode systems and other filers will be supported in the future.

About Actifio
Actifio virtualizes the data that’s the lifeblood of businesses in more than 30 countries around the world. Actifio’s Virtual Data Pipeline™ technology enables customers to protect, access, and move their data faster, more efficiently, and more simply by decoupling data from physical storage, similar to hypervisor technology decoupling compute from physical servers. For enterprise-class backup modernization, self-serve instant data access, or service provider business transformation, Actifio is the first and only choice for radically simple copy data virtualization. For more visit Actifio.com, or follow us on Twitter @Actifio.